


I Can Still Hear You Saying You Would Never Break The Chain

by heavvymetalqueen



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Infidelity, Kaz is very much dead already, M/M, implied bbkaz, implied vkaz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 05:47:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10269605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavvymetalqueen/pseuds/heavvymetalqueen
Summary: David doesn’t go to the funeral.





	

David doesn’t go to the funeral.

Master wouldn’t want him there anyway. There were going to be family, coworkers, old war buddies. No space for a thirty years old child who sometimes sucked his cock.

He stays home and watches daytime tv, and drinks the last of the cheap whiskey he “hides” under the sink. Meryl leaves him alone. He’s grateful for that.

The Colonel calls him the next day. He tells him that Nadine left a box addressed to David that they found between Master’s belongings.

David almost says he doesn’t want it. But he knows how stubborn Campbell can be, and it must have been hard for Master’s ex-wife to bring that box along in the first place.

He met her once. She’d come to drop Catherine off for a holiday with her father, and he’d been still on the couch, shirtless, dazed and well bitten. He’d felt proud of her look of disdain back then. _I stole him from you_ , he remembers thinking. What an asshole.

As if either of them could ever steal him from the ghosts clinging to his missing arm, anyway.

The box arrives by courier a week later. David sticks it under a pile of old newspapers and refuses to even look at it until Meryl goes for groceries in town on Saturday.

There isn’t much inside the box. He expected a letter, though he isn’t sure why. Master was never the kind to write letters.

There’s a tape, an old cassette that must be from the nineties. He sets it aside to look at the rest. A patch with a hound’s head embroidered on it, its eye a small brilliant rock that looks like a diamond. A pair of cracked aviators. An old, ratty dog collar. David recognizes it immediately, even if he hasn’t seen it in a decade. It’s DD’s. He’d been inconsolable when the old dog had died, and Master had held him tight, and for once it didn’t feel like he was holding somebody else.

Under the collar, a faded picture of a Miller David has never met, whole and grinning, absolutely gorgeous. A small handful of other pictures, damaged by sun and water. Miller with an empty shirt sleeve, standing side by side with a handsome man in a red scarf. Miller glaring at a gorgeous woman in a bikini and a beret. People David could not give a name to smiling at the camera, some girls, some men, even some children. A younger Miller playing a guitar at a campfire. A crumpled picture of a woman and a small child - It can' be Nadine and Catherine. David doesn’t recognize them. Miller and Big Boss posing in front of a helicopter, and then an older Miller and Big Boss again - only it’s not really Big Boss, is it? Too large, too scarred, not the man David trained under. That man never looked at Miller that way, the same way David knows he used to look at him as well.

Not that it matters anymore, really. David has the blood of both men on his hands, and really, Master’s too.

There’s one last picture at the bottom of the box. It’s of him, smoking on a bench. He looks so young and he’s so skinny, he can see the bruises under his eye and knows they were put there by Fox. He’s never seen this picture before. Master must have taken it. Kept it for some reason.

He picks the tape back up. There’s only one word scrawled in the textbox in Master’s unmistakable handwriting: _sorry_.

David twists the cassette in his hands until the brittle casing shatters, and then unspools the tape, rips it into pieces, throws whatever remains in the fireplace. The stink of the plastic melting makes his eyes water.

He doesn’t need to know. He doesn’t _want_ to know. He can’t hear Master’s voice, not now, not ever again. He doesn’t need a dead man’s apologies.

He shoves everything back into the box, and the box under the bed along with everything else he doesn’t want to think about, Master’s old Foxhound t-shirt he had to walk of shame home into one time and never returned, empty bottles Meryl doesn’t know about, his sneaking suit that’s still stiff with his brother’s blood. Maybe he’ll look at its contents again when the very smell of it doesn’t make him want to vomit. Maybe he’ll burn it. Maybe he’ll make Meryl wear the aviators and choke him, because she’d do it, because she’s entirely too good for somebody like him and the sooner she realizes that the better.

It doesn’t really matter. If he’s lucky, FOXDIE will make short work of him soon and he won’t have to live this way for much longer.

He hopes when he meets him again, Master Miller will forgive him, for everything, just like he did.


End file.
